Friday, June 06, 2008

On Becoming A Woman

Blinky the Tree Frog found a fascinating 1950's book full of advice on how to become a woman. The writer, one Harold Shryock, M.A, M.D, obviously had lots of first-hand experience on the trials and tribulations of womanhood. Fascinating that becoming a woman seemed to require a handbook, because everything the book suggests is pretty much assumed to be automatic by today's conservatives and anti-feminists, whether of the religious type or the evolutionary psychology type.

Anyway, you really should read the excerpts Blinky has so kindly provided us. They start here, continue here and here.

There you will learn that "becoming a woman" means becoming an obedient helpmate for a man, one who is good at housekeeping and who keeps the gate in sex so that he doesn't have to restrain himself at all. A woman also knows that her goal in life is to become his housewife, but she should still get some quickly-acquired job qualification so that she can work before the marriage and perhaps later if needed. Of course such qualifications never bring much of a salary...

It's a fascinating trip into the sexual politics of the past, you might say. On the other hand, almost everything in those excerpts is advocated in this country somewhere, right this very moment. Abstinence is the responsibility of girls, for example. Women gentle and home-directed while men are strong and outer-directed? I was just told this by a liberal guy.

And then there is this wonderful excerpt on sex and why it should be women who provide blow jobs for men and not the other way round, really:

Apply that concept to the porn market and the whole idea of what constitutes sex these days. It holds up astonishingly well.----Link thanks to upyernoz.

Support the Blog

More Ways To Support The Blog

About Me

For Readers Abroad

Permalink Notice

Because of changes created by Blogger, older permalinks to my archived posts no longer work. My apologies for that. The year-and-month in the old permalinks are correct, however, so you may be able to find the post you are looking for with some work. Alternatively, e-mail me for the currently functioning permalink.